armchair arcade

We're proud to announce that Chip Hageman is now the newest team member of Armchair Arcade. Many of you already know of Chip from his blog posts at Armchair Arcade and his recent contribution to Episode 5 of the Armchair Arcade Radio podcast, and of course his Websites, ArcadeOasis.net and Shmuptacular.com. Join me in welcoming Mr. Hageman to the team and be sure to check out the About Us page for more on him and the rest of the Armchair Arcade staff, which spans the United States, Canada, and Europe.

We're proud to announce that Rob Daviau, a.k.a., MaximumRD, is now the newest team member of Armchair Arcade. Many of you already know of Rob from his long-time membership at Armchair Arcade, and of course his many MaximumRD YouTube videos. Join me in welcoming Mr. Daviau to the team and be sure to check out the About Us page for more on him and the rest of the Armchair Arcade staff, who know cover the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Unfortunately, I jumped the gun a bit on declaring everything "fine". Oddly enough, at my regular job, it has still not caught up with the changes, so I was working from the old Website and ONLY seeing that when here. I've disabled all the old stuff now so hopefully there will be no more confusion. I also tried to move all of the changes on the other site to this new site, so everything should be caught up now. Hopefully my work location can catch up by Monday, because I can't even check my e-mail there due to the delay. Anyway, below is the message I had put on the old site when I thought it was the new one, hence the confusion... (I'm using LogMeIn Pro right now to access my home PC at work)

Well, following up my now non-existent blog post from yesterday entitled, "Armchair Arcade Deluxe Collector's Edition", it looks like the switchover to our new host went without a hitch. The reason why yesterday's post is non-existent is that the site on the old host was still being updated while the nameserver stuff caught up, but it looks like everything flowed through nicely. So now we have unlimited everything with Hostgator. I was so impressed with the truly seamless switchover (we're talking new site, old site, e-mail addresses, etc.) that I signed us up for their affiliate program, so if you wish to check them out, use the banner below (I'll probably move my personal sites over as soon as they're up for renewal as well). We're going to kick the tires until our monthly renewal next month and if all goes well, we'll sign up long term. We still have the site (no longer updated naturally) at the old host as a backup plan and that will be active - assuming all goes well - until that's up for renewal again, at which time we'll cancel.

So, in simple terms, what does this mean for everyone? Basically that we no longer have to worry about hosting images and files on our Website. We can record podcasts and store the files here, which can automatically be polled by iTunes. We can store large PDFs of manuals and scans. We can incorporate more images. Etc. The sky really is the limit now.

We just switched over to a new Web host that offers us unlimited everything (storage, bandwidth, etc.) and that even did all of the transferring of data from the old host. With that in mind, please let us know if you notice anything strange as the name server changes propagate over the Internet. Hopefully this means bigger and better things for everyone at Armchair Arcade. Thanks for the support!

Hi, all. We recently created a YouTube Group to collect all of our AA and related videos in one convenient spot. Join today! Also, don't forget we have a presence on Facebook, both with individual pages and an Armchair Arcade group.

Just a quick note--after some discussion, we've decided to try a few new things here at AA to get more comments and grow our community. The main difference is that we are now allowing you to post comments without having to log in or even register on the site.

Greetings, everyone. Now that we've officially entered the summer doldrums, I'm hoping that we can give the ol' Armchair a kick and get more people involved in our little community here. I doubt you'll find a group anywhere that has more interest and knowledge of classic computers and videogames, so there's plenty for us to talk about! What I'm thinking, though, is that it may be time to give folks a chance to introduce themselves, talk about their interests, and just try to get to know each other a little better. Let's swap stories!

Pardon our mess...As is no doubt already abundantly clear, Armchair Arcade has received an upgrade. Hopefully this upgrade will address all remaining performance issues from too much site activity. Unfortunately, in the mean-time, it will take us some time to get the looks and menu structure back to more or less what it was. We appreciate your patience and sticking with us through what will hopefully mean a vastly improved experience.

As most of you have no doubt realized, we're been suffering from all kinds of technical problems here at Armchair Arcade. The biggest of these is a surge of "max connections reached" problems with our database. We've been working very closely with our host, Modhost, to resolve these problems. To put it simply, Modhost has been (in the past) very gentle with us when our website went over the limits imposed on database usage, but not any longer. Now, whenever we get too many people using the site at once, we get that nasty database error. According to our stats, we had 3,699 fewer unique visitors last month than the one before, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why. This problem is killing Armchair Arcade.

Great news for those of you who don't use newsreaders/blog aggregators. We have just added the ability, through FeedBlitz, for you to receive all new Armchair Arcade blog posts daily via e-mail. Obviously we greatly encourage you to visit the site as often as possible, but with the ability to sign up for an e-mail with the content as its updated daily, you can make even more efficient use of your time. Look under the Syndication heading on our top left-hand side menu, where you'll see "Get email updates:" and a clickable orange and white icon. The process is direct and simple and you can opt-out at any time. Thanks for supporting us!